Media BS
Today’s Utter Media Bullshit Award goes to the Associated Press for the headline on this otherwise not particularly objectionable (as far as I can tell) report:
A federal judge ordered an anti-abortion activist to remove Web site postings that authorities said exhorted readers to kill an abortion provider by shooting her in the head.
Let’s, momentarily, leave aside my anarchist objection to state monopoly courts.
Let’s, momentarily, leave aside any concerns about the accuracy of the report itself.
WHY, for cryin’ out loud, is the headline:
“Anti-abortion postings ordered removed”
…and not:
“Death threat postings ordered removed”
???
I mean, that’s a bit like characterizing an armed robbery arrest as an infringement of the right to bear arms. It’s not that the hypothetical robber was carrying a gun and otherwise minding his own business, but using a gun in the commission of a robbery. That is, the posting’s anti-abortion perspective is merely incidental to the information conveyed in the report that it was ordered taken down because it was a death threat!
Yet the headline seems calculated to incorrectly make anti-abortion activists believe they are being persecuted. That isn’t to say they might not face unjust persecution in their own efforts to spread their opinions (namely, that pregnant women seeking abortions ought to, themselves, be unjustly persecuted) — but this isn’t an instance of such.
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As a former AP employee (not in editorial), I’ll just mention that the AP is very conscious that it’s crappy at writing headlines. Historically it didn’t matter, because AP editorial product was just going to local newspaper editors, who would rewrite the copy and replace the headline anyhow. But now that AP copy complete with headlines is posted unaltered to the Web, bad headlines stick out like a sore thumb. Supposedly they are working on the problem, which is a matter of training AP wire editors to think more like Web editors.
That’s fascinating! Thanks, John.